Prof.dr. Robert Passier is head of the department of Applied Stem Cell Technologies at the University of Twente since 2015 and professor at the LUMC (2017). His group aims to build highly advanced human “heart-on-chip” systems and cardiac organoid-like tissues for modelling cardiac disease, drug screening and regenerative medicine.

Passier studied Biology and Health Sciences at the University of Maastricht, followed by a PhD in 1995 at the same University. He worked as a postdoc for 3,5 years on molecular regulation of heart development and disease in the lab of Eric Olson at the University of Texas, Southwestern Medical Center (Dallas, USA). After that he joined Crucell as a postdoc/group leader with the aim to search for new drug targets in the cardiovascular field. In 2002 he returned to academia as a senior postdoc in the group of Christine Mummery at the Hubrecht Institute. Here, he worked on cardiac differentiation of human embryonic stem cells. In 2008 he was appointed as associate professor at the Leiden University Medical Center at the department of Anatomy and Embryology, heading the group “Molecular regulation of cardiac development and disease”. Passier is chair of the research theme “heart-on-chip” of the Institute for Human Organ and Disease Model Technologies (hDMT). Furthermore, he is a co-founder of Pluriomics (2011) and River BioMedics (2018). In 2019 Passier was appointed as visiting professor at the Jiao Tong University, School of Medicine, Sixth People’s Hospital, Shanghai in China.